Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Been a while since a good ol' sketchdump and I just finished up my (rather crappy) second sketchbook! So it seems like an ample opportunity to dump le` sketches. Mostly a shenanigan of studies, cloth, figures, hands, thumbnails, a train, and some other funstuffs.

Then this here is a WIP painting for our figure painting class which I may or may not have time to finish (derp), but I like where it's going at least.

And lastly here's a painted-over 3d render of mah robot for Industrial Design class. Could probably still use some more detail, but I like how it's lookin', again may or may not have time to polish it further.

Been crazy busy with work lately, so updates may be sparse, but I'm gonna try and get more in to studies so those should get tossed up decently often.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Holy month-since-last-update batman! Sorry for the mega-delay, but not really cause the reason behind it is that I got hit with a bunch of consulting work for Massive Black Shanghai (Brilliant Colors) through TAD which has been immensely awesome. Doing real work for a major company with a year of school still left to go, awesome. Needless to say since it's for actual projects it's all NDA and I won't be able to post any of it until the product is released (which will hopefully be in a few months, but I'm not sure) but whenever it is I'll have some sweet stuff to drop! In the meantime, here's the few schoolwork shenanigans I've managed to squeeze in between the facemelting deadlines.

First up is some homework for our industrial design class, basically we have to design a vehicle that's made by humans but infused with alien technology. I've pretty much never drawn vehicles before this so I'm pretty lost in the dark, but I've become immensely fascinated with industrial design lately and really want to study up on it and get megabadass. If you want to bleed from your eyes due to awesome, check out this monster: [link]
Mine are just in the rough stages right now, but hopefully will be pretty cool when polished up!

Then this here is a character design for our sci-fi project, still very WIP and very broken, I'll probably just repaint it from scratch and do a little more planning and preparation. Some of the elements are working, but a lot of it is just wrong and doesn't make any sense so I'm gonna have to do a good bit of re-designing. I like where it's headed though (except the retro laser cannon that I got a lameness scolding for, lolz.)

Hooray for design!!

And last but not least, another WIP! And you thought I'd have finished work to show, bha! This is for our figure painting class, essentially just to paint a clothed figure from ref that we shot, so I used a photo of one of the dudes down at the Austin pod in his awesome halloween zombie makeup. I'll probably wrap this one up over the next couple weeks, should be pretty sweet! The face needs some repainting though, it's a little too rendered, needs more big shapes to read well from a distance, I was zooming in too much. Sorry digital art gods! D:

Aaaaand that's it for now, hopefully it won't be another month before I have stuff to post! But if it is, know that I love you and will always think of you while I dance to various tango arrangements.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Arts!!! Here's some more stuff that I've been working on, not as much as last post but I spent a lot of this week working on presentation stuff so there were less draws.

But anywho, this first one is the final piece for our honors assignment, which was to do an editorial illustration, the article was about a death row warden. Pretty gnarly stuff, this is my first finished oil illustration and I'm actually quite happy with how it turned out! Finally starting to figure out how to apply my digital color skills to oils, which is what bothered me so much about them before. Funtimes, looking forward to doing more!

Then here's another couple fashion designs for our pop culture assignment; I'll probably rework the last one a little bit cause it's not much design past what the romans had already done, but I like how the 3rd one came out. The first is probably still my favorite though, looking forward to painting these up.

And then this is just a sketchbook doodle that turned out pretty fun that I'd like to paint up if I ever get some free time (lol).

And lastly here's another surfacing assignment, we all had to work on our flesh balls (lol, the second). It was a lot of fun though, good study for sure, lots of subtlety to try and capture. Need moar practice!

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Shenanigans! Here's today's image dump; first up is some crazy fashion design for our pop culture class. I had a lot of fun with these and am gonna do a few more and take them to final illustrations. It's really interesting to apply all the stuff we learned about composition for images and try to apply it to a set of objects, I think overall they're pretty successful. So excited to paint 'em up!

Next is a quick master copy for figure painting class, just an exercise in value and edge control. My drawing is way off, but I think the painting part (which was the important part) came out pretty good, oils and I are finally starting to get along.

Then here's a pastel figure drawing from last Saturday's session, experimenting with design a bit, and I changed the position of 3 of her 4 limbs which was silly but I enjoyed it.

And then after doing the pastel drawing I went all crazy and start oil painting on top, it was fun and weird and make some cool marks, might be something I experiment more with. It has potential, by jove!

And lastly is a plein-air study I did last week, about an hour and a half total. It was a lot of fun, I'd never gone plein-air painting before (except that one bridge piece which was digital) and it was a lot of fun. The weather was perfect and everything seemed to just work, definitely something I want to get more in to, and it's a great exercise for observing color and light.

And that's all! I shall go now and rest, for I am weary with toil and much sorrow.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

And the day after I whine about having nothing to post and renounce my updating daily status, I have 5 things to post. Ah well, such is the way of life. But it's cool, I think I like these less-frequent-with-more-images post... plus I can update during the day instead of at 2 in the morning. But anyways, art!

These are some sphere exercises we've been doing in entertainment design class, just doing surface studies of different materials and trying to capture their effects accurately. It's ridiculous amounts of fun, and super educational. Really gets you thinking about what you're seeing and why.

Thiiiiiiiis one is my final weapon for Industrial Design class, I took the model I made in sketchup, took a quick screencap, and just painted over it. Overall I think it turned out pretty cool, I'm pretty happy with the design and rendering, just gotta keep pushing my ideas more so I can make stuff that's actually interesting and doesn't just look cool.

This puppy's a speedpaint exercise we did in Industrial Design yesterday, our instructor gave us a song [Link] and told us to design and paint a vehicle in 1 hour based on how the song made us feel. I thought it gave a pretty epic sort of, "I'm gonna roll around and pummel you all in slow-motion while roaring in a masculine way." so I went for a dune buggy with a big ol' minigun. Was good practice for sure, might make this a regular practice whenever I have a spare hour.

And lastly here's a Bill Cone study and re-light I did this morning as a warmup, they're about 15 minutes each, the one on the left is a study of the original, the one on the right is a re-light from imagination. Lots of fun, and great color practice.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Aight, here's some more stuff. It is with somewhat sorrowful but also not really and kinda excited feelings that I've decided to relinquish my 'updating daily' title. It's obviously been untrue for a little while now and with half of our classes being mostly unpostable work for now I just dunno if I can keep it up. So I'll probably switch to updating once or twice a week with two or three higher quality images. I think ultimately it'll be a good switch, you'll get higher quality work in larger chunks, I'll get to stop freaking out over not having to update and losing sleep feeling obligated to update before bed. :D

SO with that out of the way, here's some frikkin art.

This one's an ink drawing I did of a grim reaper type dude, which ended up being pretty interesting. We had an art show at the ATX Pod last Friday with the Vigil studios and students were allowed to put one piece in the show, I was swamped with homework and didn't plan to put anything in but on that Thursday I got some free time, so I started thumbnailing this guy at 11 in the morning, spent an hour and a half buying bristol and a frame at like noon, and then worked on it until like 12 literally while we were tearing down the studio for the show, haha. And rather spiffily it actually sold the next day, first showpiece evar! Aww yeah.

And this second one is just a 3hr figure drawing done during Saturday's session. Just messin with pastels and having fun, not much to it. :D

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Here's a figure painting for class, a master copy of a Jeremy Lipking painting. I think I'm starting to get a better handle on soft modeling, got me some synthetic flat brushes and they're much easier to blend with than the bristle filberts I was using before.

My colors are still not as sophisticated as his, I actually made my painting much too neutral than the original which is usually the opposite of my problem, but I think it still turned out good and I learned a lot. Oils are superfun, can't wait till I'm as comfortable with them as I am digital. There's gonna be some sexay canvases going on when that happens. Need moar practice.

Holy crap 4 days without an update; my most sincere apologies. Silly life has been consuming art time, and the art time it hasn't consumed has been spend on obligatory and unpostable work, herpderp.

Hopefully I'll solve that problem this week though, I want to start doing 30-60 minute warmups every morning before getting in to official work. I think it'd be a great way to prep for the day as well as make it feel like I'm not doing school all the freakin time, so I should be able to throw those up if there's nothing better and keep the daily updates rollin, yeauah!

On the subject of this, it's just the next step in the process. We had to model out our weapons in 3D and for next class we'll be painting on top of all of them for our final images, which should be a blast. I've been having a lot of fun messing about in 3D lately and have learned a lot, now I just need to learn how to do it in 3DSMax and make some legit usable geometry. Funtimes!

Friday, September 16, 2011

Yet again spent all yesterday working on unpostable stuff, so no goodies to show, but here's some funtimes from our figure session today! The whole session was devoted to drapery studies which was a ton of freaking fun, it's probably the first time I've really carefully and observantly drawn drapery, which I should definitely get in to more often cause it's an area I'm lacking for sure.

I also need to check out the clothes section in Drawing People by Barbara Bradley; I randomly bought it a long time before TAD and one of my teachers says it has the best info on drawing clothes that you'll find in any one book, so I'mma investigate that and maybe do a few cloth studies on my own.

It definitely seems like it's something that wouldn't be that complicated to figure out once you understand the basic structure of it; I can already tell where things are pinching and creating force and how they radiate out and roll over form, I just need to learn more specifically when and why it happens and how to tell what kind of folds it would make. Cloth is probably one of my favorite things to look at when it's done really well, even more so if it's in motion which I unfortunately can't do, but it's still freakin cool. Definitely gonna be worth studying.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Here's some of the better drawings from tonight's figure session; it's been a while since we've done gestures instead of long poses, was quite fun!

On the upper ones, I was trying to do my best to identify and distribute the weight of the figure naturally, which is what all the vertical lines and ellipse ripple things are; I was looking at the model and trying to find both the center of gravity and which parts of the body were bearing most of the weight. I think that's gonna be something I try and keep practicing in gesture drawings, cause as always my ultimate goal is to draw mostly from imagination and I think the posing is one of my weaker areas; just articulating anatomy and muscles is getting pretty easy, ultimately it's just match and figuring out where things are and how best to define them, but putting together a figure that feels solid and alive is another challenge entirely.

Monday, September 12, 2011

Here's some paintingk from today for class, the assignment was to use a limited palette of Titanium White, Yellow Ochre, Alizarin Crimson and Lamp Black (I used Ivory herpderp), which is a variant of the Zorn palette.

It was a good exercise, but personally I prefer how we approached it last time with Cad Red instead of Alizarin Crimson; crimson is hard to work with for flesh cause it's pushing close enough to purple that you can't get any orange or brown tones out of it in combination with Yellow Ochre, it's missing a transitional tone. So pretty much all the stuff in the skin has to be handled just with the ochre, cause adding too much crimson makes it look bruised.

But nonetheless it was fun and edumacational and I'm pretty happy with the final outcome, I got too dark with some of the modeling in the chest, but it still holds up alright. Also I weirdly managed to remove the wide-angleness of my reference photo and made it more in-proportion. I dunno if that's good or bad. xD

And speaking of, the ref was from characterdesigns.com which is a spiffy resource for figure ref.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Here's some progress on my Warhammer character, took my pencil sketch in to painter and am just shapefudging the heck out of it. I've never been much of a lineart guy, so hopefully I'll be able to work out some nice shapes and then pull out some forms from this mess. Still need to finish working out the rest of his equipment and his backstory though so I can get all the little quirks and details right.

Looking forward to working more on it though; it's been a while since I've just painted something for fun and not had to worry about making it modelable or anything. And I'm having some fun with this painterly process, incorporating some color in to this initial values stage is really enjoyable I think, start setting up temperatures right from the get go. Black & white underpaintings might be going bye-bye for me, aww yeah. Good tiems.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Herpderp, nothin yesterday cause I drew unpostable stuff and then made music for fun. I'll post up the music sometime if it turns out to be awesome.

In the meantime, here's a figure droar! Had some fun with this one, it's not quite as successful as Thursday's I don't think but I like some of the forms going on in the stomach, and I played around with some color which was pretty fun. I've enjoyed hoodling back to my pastels with these last couple, it's pretty fun to just paint with shapes and such.

Friday, September 9, 2011

Here's my drawing from tonight's figure session. I had a pretty frustrating day so I went back to pastels for the first time in a long time to just play with shapes and values and form and just have fun and not worry about studying something specific, and I think it turned out pretty successfully.

My initial plan was just to use the brown and light yellow, but as always seems to happen I got ancy and busted out a warm and cool pastel to spice things up, which I think in this case turned out to be a good decision, I like some of the more saturated linework set against the more muted forms inside, it's something I'd want to play with for sure, maybe see if I can get some of that effect in to my finished works.

I was also trying to do a decent composition for possibly the first time ever in a life drawing session, and I think it worked out alright. The flowy white cloth was added from imagination and I think overall the piece ended up having some nice elegance, lots of fun for sure.

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Here's the result of some of today's doodling; me and a few other guys at the Austin pod are kicking off a 40k campaign and it's gonna be pretty much epic. At the moment I'm probably going for a Cleric, so this is just a relatively quick sketch to get a feel for his shapes and gear, which was a lot of fun for sure, 40k has a nice mix of fantastic and sci-fi elements in it.

Still need to work out a backstory and name and pretty much everything for this dude, but I like the direction he's heading in and maybe I'll get time to paint him up all fancy sometime, we shall see!

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

No update yesterday, what?! Obviously, yesterday was labor day, so in honor of such a laborious day I did no labor. But, then, a day off is good every once in a while, raite? raite?

Anyways, here's an updated version of my God of War weapon design after getting a critique last class; it's not a major change, the main thing is that some of the elements are a little bigger and bulkier and burlier and all those manly B adjectives, so it fits in a little better with Kratos' character now, hopefully at least. Weapons are funtimes.

Aaand it seems like I am at a loss of description, so that's it and have a good one!

Sunday, September 4, 2011

Sorry for the lack of updating yesterday; had a pretty much non-stop day with crits, figure drawing and D&D, and by the time I got home it was like 3am and I had to get up at 7 so the blog was shuffled to the side, haha. But it was a good day, and I got this drawing done which I'm quite happy with!

It was a bit of a media experiment, I tried using white charcoal on toned paper for the first time, as well as some pretty swag charcoal pencils (that I broke like 3 times sharpening). It was quite a fun way to work; generally I prefer to go from midtones out, and the charcoal is easy to blend on this particular paper, so this might become my technique of choice for 3 hour poses... at least for a while, haha.

Gotta keep pushing my faces, hands and feet, but I think some other areas like the forearm and forward-most knee are working pretty well. Funtimes!

Friday, September 2, 2011

Here's yet another figure painting, the final for the drawing I posted up yesterday. Had a lot of fun with this one and feel like I'm finally starting to make some progress in understanding with these silly oils. Slowly but surely my mixing knowledge and control of color is improving, I'm really excited to see how much this helps my digital work cause I won't need to rely on overlays and glow effects nearly as much since this is forcing me to learn how to create those effects just by using the right colors.

And as far as that's concerned, I'm actually pretty happy with this piece; I think a lot of the color variation is working, and it's getting closer to having the effect of light I've been trying to achieve, and I think I managed to pull off a little glow in the background around her hips. So I think, for the most part, I can cross color off of my list of things to stop sucking at with oils. Next up is edge control, after that brush work. Then the ever-present problem of actually drawing a decent figure to paint on top of, gonna be pushing that forever, which I thoroughly look forward to.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Holy September, Batman, it's September! Where has the time gone? Didn't school just start like yesterday? How can I be nearly half done with TAD? Is Elvis really an alien?

These are questions that must be answered. But for now, here's a figure drawing! As usual, practicing anatomy blah blah herp derp, this one's gonna be a figure painting which I'll probably do over the weekend, I feel like I've got some good failures to re-attempt from my last couple paintings, notably with the background and getting relative chroma right. We'll see, I'm excited to work on it.

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

After a few extra rounds of feedback and adjustments, here's my final Druid orthograph. It was definitely a good challenge, this is the first actual ortho I've ever done and I learned a ton of stuff from it.

It's sort of the cast drawing of the entertainment industry, every little thing must be considered and accurately drawn. I pity one of my classmates who chose an alien creature with porcupine-like spines on his back who was told that, yes, he did have to work out the perspective and make the spines identical in all his views, haha. But it's good practice and good discipline, really forces you to slow down, think, and do a good job, cause if you half-ass it early on then the mistakes just snowball and it becomes impossibly hard to fix.

All in all though it was fun, looking forward to getting in to some more painterly look and feel concept work. I know I need my veggies first, but dessert is just so sweet.

Here's my final for our weapon design assignment in Industrial Design class. As before, this is a design meant to fit in to the God of War universe. Though I liked some of the sword roughs I had done, our instructor thought that it might be interesting to incorporate a more delicate weapon in to the game so I ended up going with the chain sword whip thing, with a bit of a re-design, and this is what came of it.

All in all this was a very big learning experience, both technically and process-wise. I worked on this for a good portion of yesterday and today, and when I got home today I looked at my final and realized it was pretty much horrible ( Link ) and so I started completely from scratch at like 9pm with a much better understanding of the process and goals and got a much more successful result.

Though I think I got a cool shape and the action is nice in the first attempt, I failed to provide so much necessary information for this particular kind of rendering, the weapon is just vaguely rendered in an undetermined value range, there's no description of different surfaces, barely any description of color, and the piece itself just doesn't show off the weapon well which is the main point. So in starting over, I made it much more of a point to focus on properly rendering the weapon, gathering reference for the different types of surfaces, and making a much clearer value structure. So I'm definitely pleased with how it's all turned out, and I feel like this is a big step closer to giving assignments my absolute best, rather than just turning them in on time.

Monday, August 29, 2011

Here's a painting from today's session, it was the continuation of a pose we were working on a couple weeks ago and the second sitting got cancelled, but I had my drawing all finished after that one so all I had to do for this was transfer to canvas and have fun paintin. Overall I'm really pleased with how it turned out, I think I managed to get much better color than I have before, still learning to incorporate neutrals in to the skin tones to make it look not crappy. Still got a long ways to go, but it's better than the last one, which is all that matters! :D

Now it's time for late nights and homework-finishing. CHARGE IN TO THE SLEEPLESS PRODUCTIVE YONDER!

Sunday, August 28, 2011

Here's the beginnings of a personal piece I'm gonna do. It's probably one of the first personal pieces I've done that's actually personal in a deeper sense than, "Oh I have some free time let's paint something." and I'm really looking forward to working on it.

It came as sort of a divine inspiration sorta thing, In about 10 minutes I was just thinking about it and knew exactly what I wanted it to be and can see the final really clearly.

I'm gonna do my best to not let this one fall by the wayside and do as good a job as I can on it; even if it means working on it half an hour every couple days for a few months, I feel like this'll be a winner. We shall see. :)

Saturday, August 27, 2011

Here's some figure droarings from today's session. Good times as always, same as usual, made some improvements, getting better, long ways to go, hardy boogha blah.

Except for the rendered ones up top, I tried I really push my constructive approach. I'd been working constructively before by building in 3D forms rather than just shape, but I was abstracting the forms in front of me more than understand them, so with this one I tried to really work from the ground up and work out the ribcage, pelvis, scapulae, etc. etc. and add muscles on top that matched the form of the model. It was a challenge, but I think it gave me a chance to apply a lot of stuff that'll help my imagined work, which is my ultimate goal. I think the torso-leaning-on-staff one in the lower-ish right is my favorite of the bunch.

Here's some more work on my D&D character, I finished writing up his backstory and am trying to work out his design. Still got a lot of work to do on the armor, but I think it's going in a good direction, just need to keep exploring until I can find the right shapes to get him feeling right.

Looking forward to painting this dude! It might take a while what with all the usual homework, but I want to get it to a finished level at some point, we shall see.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Here's a few figure drawings from today's session. We were doing half hour poses and I felt like experimenting with some drawing challenges and re-draw the same figure from a different viewpoint from imagination. The back views in this are observed, the front views are imagined.

I'm pretty happy with how they turned out, and it was fun to apply the turnaround concept we did in Figure last semester to a fully fleshed figure rather than just skeletons, it's a good exercise for sure. And I actually like the imagined front view of the standing pose better than the observed back view, hurhur. Practice practice practice, doin mah art pushups.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Not too much to show today, but here's some sketches for the design of my character in the D&D group we started up at the Austin POD.

He's a deva cleric that I'm thinking is going to have been betrayed and abandoned his divine ways and turned to a darker path, which should provide some interesting visual opposites in shape language, which is what the little comparisons at the bottom are for.

I'd like to design and draw this guy out really well, so this might be a project I work on for the next month or so until reaching a finished illustration, but maybe it won't take that long, we'll see how much work on it free time will allow, hehe.

Still got a lot of work to do on him obviously, these are just basic ideas, need to do lots more thumbnails and iterations and experimenting until I find the right mix of things, but it should be a lot of fun. One of the nice things about playing D&D is that it's a game, but half of it is doing concept work, so I can totally say that it's productive, pwnage.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Here's some figure droarings for today. We had Eva Strangelove as our model for this session which was pretty cool. I tried a bit of a different approach and tried to be more analytical and observant, trying to describe as much as possible with very simple forms. Overall I think it was quite helpful and resulted in some pretty decent drawings; as fate would have it the easel I chose ended up being directly behind the light source so until the very last pose there was no pretty form for me to get caught up in rendering, I should probably take that easel more often. : P

So yeah, not much to say about 'em, just hu$tle and grind time. Gotta keep pushing so I can draw these dern things from imagination.

Here's a WIP for our second assignment in Industrial Design class with Josh Nizzi. For this one we have to do some weapon roughs for one of five different games that he gave as examples, and I chose God of War.

The basic gist is pretty much a compositional thumbnail; it's all about figuring out the shapes and values and being sure it feels right before moving on to more involved drawing. I don't think I've ever done this before, but it's a lot of fun.

I think one of the coolest things is finding out how much overlap there is between the different disciplines in art; making a great game design requires a lot of the same stuff that making a great illustration does. These are probably pretty mediocre weapons as it's my first try at it, but whatever goodness they have is totally coming from composition class, learning to create abstract shapes for mood, including different types of shapes for balance and contrast, creating implied lines of action, and a whole bunch of stuff. I've only ever really composed paintings, so using that knowledge to approach weapons is really fascinating, and it'll be even more so to start applying it in 3D whenever we get around to doing that.

So yeah, hope ya dig it so far, I'll probably be refining these further tomorrow and we'll see what happens. Excited to get feedback on them, it's a brave new world!

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Here's some funtimes from today, my first full-figure assignment in Figure Painting class with the mighty Jon Foster. This was a ton of fun to do and I think I made some pretty epic breakthrough as far as understanding and mixing color go, as well as how to handle oils.

One of the biggest breakthroughs came from re-watching Scott Waddell's webisode about painting an eye (Do check it out, it's worth a watch: [Link]).

I'd been having trouble mixing skintones cause there's just so much variation in skin that I didn't know what or how to mix, but he mentioned that it helps to start by finding the lightmost facing plane on the surface and use that to identify the local value, local hue, and local chroma (how light and dark, what color, and how intense the color is). So I gave that a try and it realllllyyy simplified everything down; instead of trying to mix an array of skin tones I was able to just start with the base and make all other mixtures relative to that, just saying darker, lighter, redder, greener, etc. I think it's some of my best color in oil so far. Now the next step is to get away from copying the photo's color as much and exaggerating it to better give the feeling of light.

I was also, again, trying to get some nice soft academic form modeling going on, and I think I got closer than last time with the bearded dude painting, but it's not quite there. I used a fan brush and a ragged round brush to ponce (tap) the canvas and then gently brush to soften edges, and it works but it's not as clean a final product as I'd like it to be, I think I still need to work on a light touch to really get nice blending going on.

But overall I'm quite happy with how this turned out, super excited to do more! Took about 4-5 hours, oil on 16"x20" canvas board, mostly a 1 inch flat sable, zorn palette.

Saturday, August 20, 2011

We had a pretty fun model for these ones today, she was really slender and defined and you could pick out pretty much every muscle quite distinctly. It was more evident in the shorter gestures rather than these longer ones, but I didn't really get any good drawings of those.

Took a pretty chill day today, so here's a quickie paintsketch. About an hour total, half drawing half painting. Obviously inspired by the Ritualist from Guild Wars, which have some of my favorite designs.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Here's the result of tonight's figure session, a 3 hour portrait which I did in oils. It was pretty fun, but I'm not too stoked with how the portrait turned out; I like it in the sense that I tried something I'd never done before, but I don't like it in the sense that it's... not very good. xD

The new thing I did was at about 2 hours in to the process I just didn't like where it was at all, the drawing was getting worse, some of the colors and marks were getting muddy, and just overall it looked pretty meh. So I grabbed a paper towel and wiped the whole thing pretty firmly which took off a lot of the paint, softened all the edges like crazy, but left a ghost of the image there which I spent the last hour working out of.

The process itself was good cause that's how I'm most comfortable working; start soft and find the forms inside of a blur, and if it's not working go back to soft and find them again. But that's digital, with this after I wiped everything down I realized that every color in the piece had changed and been affected by another color and I had no idea how to mix any of them accurately to paint on top of the ghost, so the last hour was just spent clarifying the background, adding highlights and not knowing what to do.

I think ultimately that's where my biggest weakness with oil is right now. I can mix up some flesh tones and it'll look decent, but actually mixing up the exact color that I'm seeing in life is just confusing still, mixing up a color that you're seeing in relation to other colors but mixing in relation with just white is... mindbreaking. I think that's where most of my struggle is going to be with figure painting class this semester, but that's why it's fun! So for this portrait, it's a failure moving towards success, hurrah!

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Allllllmost done with this! Got all 4 views worked out and gotten a round of feedback from my instructor, so now I've just gotta make another quality pass on it. Main thing to fix is the hands, and also make his shoulders broader and shoulderpads bulkier, see if I can get him more heroic looking.

All in all this has been a pretty fun process and I'm glad that most of the critiques I got were nit-picks, I feel like I tried my hardest and it paid off, and now I'm gonna try a little harder! Gonna try and keep that up.